"but the specificity was lower (90% CI: 84 to 95 versus 97% CI: 93 to 99, p = 0.016)."

Am I right in thinking that lower specificity means more false positives?

I don't know enough about the numbers to understand what the actual impact would be, but relatively low specificity would be enough to give public health authorities pause, or at least I think so.

We actually see the same sort of problem with police dogs on drug duty. High sensitivity, lower specificity. They're really good at sniffing out drugs, but with the caveat that they often alert when no drugs are present. It happens enough that courts are beginning to reevaluate whether using them at traffic stops is Constitutionally acceptable.

Of course, with a positive covid dog sniff test, you could always just do the swab for verification. That's how HIV testing worked for a long time. First generation antibody tests were highly sensitive but not as specific, so a positive antibody ELISA screening was always backed up by a Western Blot to screen out false positives.

And that worked fine, so I guess covid-sniffing dogs could work fine too.